Following on from the success of the Google Summer of Code™ program, Google is holding a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students 13-18) called Google Code-In with the aim of encouraging young people to participate in open source. We will work with open source organizations, each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be completed by student contestants. Tasks can be anything a project needs help with, from bug fixes to writing documentation to user experience research.

2. What are the goals of this contest?

Google Code-in (GCI) is intended to help students who may have wanted to get involved in open source but didn't know where to start. By working through the tasks suggested by organizations, contestants will be given the opportunity to engage with the open source community and get involved. The participating open source projects gain the benefit of additional contributions to their project, often in important areas that may get overlooked for whatever reason.

It is Google's not so secret hope that the student contestants of today will be long-term contributors to these and other open source projects in the future.

Task Categories

Tasks will typically fall into the following categories:

Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code

Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents

Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing

Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality

Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions

How to Write a Task

Please order the tasks in increasing difficulty, from 'easy', to 'medium', to 'difficult'

Give it a descriptive title.

Explain any acronyms or slang that an outsider would not know.

List potential mentors and give both a recommended and an optional background.

Also give an estimate for roughly how long this task should take.

Provide as many links and background information as possible.

Task Template

Title: Name of the app/area and a short description of what the task entails

Category: [see Task Categories above]

Difficulty: (easy, medium, difficult)

Estimated time: A "day" range of how long you think the task will take to complete.

Task description: Consists of:

An initial sentence or two that describes what the task entails and why a student would want to spend their time on it (emphasize importance to project, transferable skills...).

Several sentences/bullets that provide more detail into the task: What approach should students use? What level of detail are you looking for?

A sentence about the expected deliverables.

Benefits: A short explanation of why this task is useful for the project. This should help motivate the students too.

Requirements: A small list of skill requirements. This helps the students know if they might be able to complete the task, for example e.g. Git, programming languages, etc.

Extra: (optional) A description of some extra action that the student can do if he's enjoying the task.

Links: A list of links that should help the student start on this task.

Potential Mentor: The person we should list as the "owner" of the task, who will monitor student submissions and give the final sign-off. This should be either you or someone who you've talked to about taking this on.

Proposed tasks

Task : Create a Perl 6 T-Shirt

Potential Mentors:

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Outreach

Background: Vector Graphics

Details: Perl 6 would like a really cool T-shirt so that Perl 6 developers and users can show their pride. The result needs to be modifiable in in an open source tool and be in a vector graphic format.
Any of the current Parrot logos can be used as a starting point, or a totally new graphic can be created.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Perl 6 T-shirts. As Google Summer of Code has shown, T-shirts motivate open source developers and make them happy :)

Time: Roughly one week

Task : Create a Parrot Virtual Machine T-Shirt

Potential Mentors:

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Outreach

Background: Vector Graphics

Details: Parrot would like a really cool T-shirt so that Parrot developers and users can show their pride. The result needs to be modifiable in in an open source tool and be in a vector graphic format.
Any of the current Parrot logos can be used as a starting point, or a totally new graphic can be created.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot T-shirts. As Google Summer of Code has shown, T-shirts motivate open source developers and make them happy :)

Time: Roughly one week

Task : Create a PL/Parrot T-Shirt

Potential Mentors:

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Outreach

Background: Vector Graphics

Details: PL/Parrot embeds the Parrot Virtual Machine in the PostgreSQL database. We would like a really cool T-shirt so that Parrot and Postgres developers and users can show their pride. The result needs to be modifiable in in an open source tool and be in a vector graphic format.
Any of the current Parrot logos can be used as a starting point, or a totally new graphic can be created.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any PL/Parrot or Parrot T-shirts. As Google Summer of Code has shown, T-shirts motivate open source developers and make them happy :)

Time: Roughly one week

Task : Compare and Contrast Google's Dalvik VM and Parrot VM

Potential Mentors:

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Research

Background: Technical writing

Details: We would like a short paper that compares and contrasts the Dalvik VM to Parrot VM, describing which characterists each shared, what things are different, how optimizations are done and which ideas Parrot can utilize from Dalvik. This paper should be in an open source format, and can take the form of a blog post or a POD file that can be included with the Parrot documentation or on the Parrot website.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Chinese, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/dev to Chinese

Potential Mentors: jimmyZ

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Chinese, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Chinese speaker to translate our main website pages to Chinese.
This task is to translate the "Developer Resources" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Chinese, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/languages to Chinese

Potential Mentors: jimmyZ

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Chinese, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Chinese speaker to translate our main website pages to Chinese.
This task is to translate the "Languages" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Chinese, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/dev/docs/user to Chinese

Potential Mentors: jimmyZ

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Chinese, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Chinese speaker to translate our main website pages to Chinese.
This task is to translate the "Users/Docs" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Chinese, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/foundation to Chinese

Potential Mentors: jimmyZ

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Chinese, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Chinese speaker to translate our main website pages to Chinese.
This task is to translate the "Foundation" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Chinese, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/download to Spanish

Potential Mentors: NotFound

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Spanish, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Spanish speaker to translate our main website pages to Spanish.
This task is to translate the download page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Spanish, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/dev to Spanish

Potential Mentors: NotFound

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Spanish, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Spanish speaker to translate our main website pages to Spanish.
This task is to translate the "Developer Resources" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Spanish, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/languages to Spanish

Potential Mentors: NotFound

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Spanish, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Spanish speaker to translate our main website pages to Spanish.
This task is to translate the "Languages" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Spanish, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/dev/docs/user to Spanish

Potential Mentors: NotFound

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Spanish, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Spanish speaker to translate our main website pages to Spanish.
This task is to translate the "Users/Docs" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Spanish, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/foundation to Spanish

Potential Mentors: NotFound

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Spanish, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Spanish speaker to translate our main website pages to Spanish.
This task is to translate the "Foundation" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Spanish, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/download to German

Potential Mentors: moritz

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: German, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native German speaker to translate our main website pages to German.
This task is to translate the download page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to German, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/dev to German

Potential Mentors: moritz

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: German, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native German speaker to translate our main website pages to German.
This task is to translate the "Developer Resources" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to German, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/languages to German

Potential Mentors: moritz

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: German, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native German speaker to translate our main website pages to German.
This task is to translate the "Languages" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to German, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/dev/docs/user to German

Potential Mentors: moritz

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: German, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native German speaker to translate our main website pages to German.
This task is to translate the "Users/Docs" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to German, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/foundation to German

Potential Mentors: moritz

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: German, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native German speaker to translate our main website pages to German.
This task is to translate the "Foundation" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to German, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/download to Russian

Potential Mentors: bacek

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Russian, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Russian speaker to translate our main website pages to Russian.
This task is to translate the download page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Russian, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/dev to Russian

Potential Mentors: bacek

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Russian, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Russian speaker to translate our main website pages to Russian.
This task is to translate the "Developer Resources" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Russian, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/languages to Russian

Potential Mentors: bacek

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Russian, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Russian speaker to translate our main website pages to Russian.
This task is to translate the "Languages" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Russian, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/dev/docs/user to Russian

Potential Mentors: bacek

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Russian, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Russian speaker to translate our main website pages to Russian.
This task is to translate the "Users/Docs" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Russian, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/foundation to Russian

Potential Mentors: bacek

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Russian, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Russian speaker to translate our main website pages to Russian.
This task is to translate the "Foundation" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Russian, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/download to Hebrew

Potential Mentors: szabgab

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Hebrew, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Hebrew speaker to translate our main website pages to Hebrew.
This task is to translate the download page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Hebrew, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/dev to Hebrew

Potential Mentors: szabgab

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Hebrew, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Hebrew speaker to translate our main website pages to Hebrew.
This task is to translate the "Developer Resources" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Hebrew, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/languages to Hebrew

Potential Mentors: szabgab

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Hebrew, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Hebrew speaker to translate our main website pages to Hebrew.
This task is to translate the "Languages" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Hebrew, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/dev/docs/user to Hebrew

Potential Mentors: szabgab

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Hebrew, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Hebrew speaker to translate our main website pages to Hebrew.
This task is to translate the "Users/Docs" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Hebrew, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Translate parrot.org/foundation to Hebrew

Potential Mentors: szabgab

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Translation

Background: Hebrew, translation, Drupal

Details: Parrot would like a native Hebrew speaker to translate our main website pages to Hebrew.
This task is to translate the "Foundation" page text.

Benefits: Currently we do not have any Parrot documentation in any Asian language. We hope that translating important documents to Hebrew, as well as other Asian languages, allows Parrot to reach more developers around the world.

Time: Roughly one week, depending on how much the student must learn how to translate new technical words.

Task : Create Snazzy Logo for Parrot on RTEMS

Potential Mentors: kid51

Difficulty: Easy

Category: Outreach

Background: Graphics

Details: Parrot Virtual Machine and the RTEMS project, which is a real-time embedded operating system, have been teaming up, so that Parrot can run on satellites and all kinds of other awesome real-time hardware. We need a logo for this project. It should represent the excitement of being able to use dynamic languages on real-time hardware.

Benefits: Parrot+RTEMS is a very exciting project, but it is hard to convey to other without a logo to catch their attention. This logo will draw in more people who are interested in Parrot and Real-Time Embedded systems.

Task : Make parrot.org reflect current development and be more useful

Potential Mentors: ?

Difficulty: Easy

Background Required: Familiar with HTML, CSS, RSS

Details: The parrot.org main web site is currently not dynamic enough. It is hard to see what is going on in our community right now from our main entry page. This task will make usability improvements to our site such as: List the last few commits to our codebase, giving links to relevant mailing lists and irc channels (and logs), summarizing recent blog posts from Planet Parrot, etc. PLEASE ADD MORE DETAIL.

Task : Convert tests written in perl5 to pir - This would be multiple tasks

Potential Mentors: mikehh, ?

Difficulty: Medium

Background: Perl 5, readup on pir

Details: Some of our test files generate PIR (Parrot Intermediate Representation) files from within perl5 code. This also tends to generate a lot of files (that later have to be removed, when make clean/realclean is run). It would be better if these test files were written directly in PIR. Some progress has been made in this area but there is a lot left to be done.

This would give the student a reasonable introduction to parrot and be useful in getting a lot of tests converted.

A tutorial and examples would be provided.

A possible (ungraded at the moment) list of tests that could be converted each of which could be a task:

Details: Many of our PMCs don't have complete test coverage. Although 100% coverage may not be possible in all cases, we can do better. We will provide a list of PMCs which need increased test coverage and notes about any PMCs which may provide difficulties in reaching 100%. A task will be complete when, at the mentor's discretion, a PMC's coverage is increased as much as is practical, ideally to 100%. This task requires the use of PIR, but increasing test coverage will usually require a small and easily-learned subset of PIR.

Task : Increase test coverage of Math::Primality

Potential Mentors: bubaflub

Difficulty: Medium

Background: Perl 5, Prime numbers, Devel::Cover

Details: Math::Primality is a Perl 5 CPAN module that has advanced prime-checking algorithms. It was a GSoC project in 2009. Currently some new algorithms were added, but they don't have proper test coverage. Having better test coverage is necessary because people will rely on the correctness of the algorithms in this module for cryptography and number theory applications. This task will involve the student learning how to build and test Math::Primality, as well as analyzing the test coverage with the Devel::Cover CPAN module. When parts of the code are identified that need more tests, the students will work with the mentor to write tests that verify those parts of the code work correctly.

Task : Increase Test Coverage for NumMatrix2D

Potential Mentors: Whiteknight

Difficulty: Medium

Background: Linear Algebra

Details: The Parrot-Linear-Algebra library adds linear algebra support to Parrot. The NumMatrix2D type needs additional tests for arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication). In addition to testing valid operations and the correct results, we need serious testing of error conditions. The user should probably write at least 10-20 tests to exercise things that existing tests do not cover.

Task : Increase Test Coverage for ComplexMatrix2D

Potential Mentors: Whiteknight

Difficulty: Hard

Background: Linear Algebra

Details: The Parrot-Linear-Algebra library adds linear algebra support to Parrot. The ComplexMatrix2D type needs additional tests for arithmetic operations (addition, multiplication). In addition to testing valid operations and the correct results, we need serious testing of error conditions. The user should probably write at least 15-25 tests to exercise things that existing tests do not cover.